Fan Pu Zeng
Incoming Linux Engineer at Jane Street. CMU SCS Class of 2022, MSCS Class of 2023. Currently located in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Hello! I am Fan Pu, currently a M.S in Computer Science student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), having recently completed my Bachelor’s in Computer Science in 2022 at CMU as well. I have been actively involved in the open-source programming assignment auto-grading platform Autolab since 2018. I currently serve as the Masters Student Liaison for the Singapore Students Association. I also used to play Capture-The-Flag (CTF) competitions with PPP. I have previously interned at Jane Street, Meta, Asana, and Saleswhale (acquired 2022). This semester (Spring 2023), I will be a TA for 10-708 Probabilistic Graphical Models.
I am broadly interested in rigorously proving why machine learning techniques work and what guarantees we can extract out of them, borrowing tools from theoretical computer science and mathematics. My eventual goal is to build a startup in AI/ML using the things that I’ve learnt, for the betterment of humanity.
In my free time, I enjoy bouldering, running, learning new things, watching anime, playing Genshin Impact, and cosplaying. If I have an extended break I enjoy traveling, especially hiking and exploring the great outdoors. Most of the banner pictures on my blog posts were taken during these hikes.
I grew up in my hometown Singapore before moving to the US for college. I try to go back and visit once a year.
Feel free to reach out to me at fzeng[dot]andrew[dot]cmu[dot]edu. Unfortunately, I am unable to provide referrals for people that I have not worked with.
I recently earned a Technician amateur radio license, and my callsign is KC3UFE.
This blog was originally started on 24 June 2018, although it has taken many forms since then. I write about things that I find interesting, and which might be helpful for other people, with the goal that people learn something new when they read my posts. I also try to have my posts reviewed by my friends who are experts in an area whenever possible to ensure that everything is factually accurate. Do let me know if you have any article suggestions. All banner pictures on the blog are taken by yours truly!
news
Jan 9, 2023 | "The Art of LaTeX: Common Mistakes, and Advice for Typesetting Beautiful, Delightful Proofs" made it onto the front page of Hacker News on 01/08/2023! |
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Jan 5, 2023 | I added a new page to curate CMU CS courses that have publicly available lecture videos and course content, available on the CMU Online tab. Hope this will be helpful for many people! Feel free to let me know if there are things that I missed which would be good to add via email. |
Jan 4, 2023 | I will be a TA for 10-708 Probabilistic Graphical Models this Spring, taught by Andrej Risteski! |
Jan 2, 2023 | I wrote a new article The Art of LaTeX: Common Mistakes, and Advice for Typesetting Beautiful, Delightful Proofs, which I hope will be useful to many students! |
Dec 29, 2022 | Happy to share that a new post is up, A Concise Proof of the Central Limit Theorem, and Its Actually Useful Version, the Berry-Esseen Theorem! |
Dec 26, 2022 | I wrote a new blog post, Reinforcement Learning Policy Optimization: Deriving the Policy Gradient Update. |
Dec 19, 2022 | I migrated my blog from jasper2 to al-folio as it has better support for non-blog post pages. |